As the Empire declines it gets nastier

As an empire declines, it becomes necessary to push harder on all three fronts: obedience at home, oppression abroad, and destruction of the living planet. I present a few examples of each phenomenon and embed a brief video clip at the end.

Obedience at home was the subject of a recent essay in this space. Those who do not obey the corporate government are subject to restrictions on personal freedom. For those who are serious about telling the truth to the masses, imprisonment and torture await.

Oppression abroad is obvious even to the typical television-watching American with a reasonably open mind. In the United States of Absurdity, we depend upon our ever-dwindling rural humans for cannon fodder. After all, as pointed out by U.S. President Jimmy Carter during his final year in the Oval Office, the Persian Gulf and its resources belong to us. By extension, the world is our oilster.

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About Guy McPherson

Guy McPherson is professor emeritus of natural resources and the environment at the University of Arizona, where he taught and conducted research for 20 years. He's published more than 100 articles along with eleven books, including Walking Away From Empire and his most recent, Going Dark, published in October 2013. Guy has focused for many years on conservation of biological diversity and lives in an off-grid, straw-bale house where he practices durable living via organic gardening, raising small animals for eggs and milk, and working with members of his rural community. Learn more at guymcpherson.com or email Guy at grm@ag.arizona.edu.

Comments

Wonder how long this can go on. At least more people are awake now. The hardest thing for me to swallow is that, in spite of knowledge, it doesn’t really seem one can do much to stop the madness except at a personal level.

” … it doesn’t really seem one can do much to stop the madness except at a personal level.”

But the massive / popular revolt and rebellion that the world now desperately requires is comprised of “personal level” commitments and actions. It surely won’t be a (r)evolution with a Headquarters and a top-down pyramid of “leadership”. Dont make the mistake of believing individual engagements with the Machine are meaningless. Know that millions and millions will soon join the rebellion. One only has to look at the unfolding planetary climate catastrophe to know that the current cultural mythos and lifeway is coming to an end very soon!

By the way, the revolt/rebellion I refer to is not about fighting the current system. It’s about abandoning the current system — not feeding it, not serving it, not cooperating with it. And creating local, small scaled low fossil energy alternatives to it. It’s not a war. It’s not a “revolution” in the old sense. Those are unwinable, anyway. Dropping out is how we win.